Archive page 6 of 73
May 26, 2025
Every four years, Americans are reminded that they do not elect the president directly. They vote for electors, members of something called the Electoral College, who cast the real ballots for president…
May 15, 2025
Tartans carry the weight of tradition. They are imagined as ancient patterns, clan-bound, Highland-tested, and restricted to those who can trace their ancestry back to some moor or glen. The popular image…
May 12, 2025
The United States Postal Service is one of the most quietly extraordinary systems in modern life. It is not magical or divine. It works because hundreds of thousands of people make it…
May 8, 2025
Exploratory data analysis often faces challenges due to outliers and skewed distributions, which can distort underlying patterns. Many conventional statistical methods depend on means, making them highly sensitive to extreme values and…
Mar 30, 2025
Among the half-remembered titles of the medieval world, few are more peculiar than the vidame . A word no longer in currency, even among most students of nobility, the vidame occupied a…
Mar 8, 2025
Recently, I encountered a comment that was just dead wrong: If 100% of people got a vaccine, people would still get whatever they were vaccinated for. If they were 100% effective the…
Feb 6, 2025
Statistical methods have continually evolved, often in response to new challenges and advancements in computational power. However, not all valuable techniques remain in the spotlight. Some, despite their potential, fade into obscurity.…
Jan 31, 2025
Imagine you are ranking a set of teams, chess players, or even flavors of ice cream. You do not have an objective rating scale--only a series of head-to-head matchups. If chocolate beats…
Jan 29, 2025
Studying heraldry is both an intellectual and practical pursuit, requiring a strong grasp of history, art, and precise language. Over the past months, I have worked through the Heraldry Course offered by…
Jan 28, 2025
The OODA Loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—is a decision-making framework originally developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd for military strategy. Boyd, a fighter pilot and strategist, introduced the concept to describe…
Jan 27, 2025
Let us set the scene: you are running an experiment, testing different approaches to a problem. Maybe you are optimizing fraud detection algorithms, fine-tuning ad targeting strategies, or running an A/B/n test…